Gene RODDENBERRY
may have pitched Star Trek to
network executives as "Wagon Train to the stars," but for one key bit of
casting he chose another venerable western—Gunsmoke—as his
inspiration, modeling his starship's doctor on Milburn Stone's "Doc" Adams, a
competent but crusty old fellow with an overfondness for alcohol. And to play
the part of Dr. Leonard "Bones" McCoy, he predictably cast an actor whose prior
experience had mostly involved film and television westerns, DeForest Kelley.

To his credit,
Kelley quickly made McCoy a character more interesting, and more central to his
series' success, than Stone's "Doc." In a competition for the affections of
William SHATNER's Captain Kirk which was the structural equivalent of a
romantic triangle, McCoy established himself as the comforting, boy-next-door
alternative to that strange and aloof tall-dark-stranger, Leonard
NIMOY's Mr. Spock. In addition, while a master
of start-of-the-art futuristic medicine, McCoy otherwise thought, spoke, and reacted
precisely like a man from the twentieth century abruptly teleported into the
future, espousing down-home values and recoiling from advanced technology and
other novelties. In sum, while mundane viewers might admire Kirk, and might be
fascinated by Spock, they could always identify with McCoy; and thus, in his
own subdued way, Kelley helped to make the series belatedly popular with people
who had lacked prior exposure to science fiction. Still, third-season efforts
to explore McCoy's character more deeply were far from successful: a projected
episode about McCoy's daughter, "Joanna," somehow mutated into the unwatchable
"Day of the Dove," and a story about a dying McCoy falling madly in love with a
woman in a hollowed-out asteroid, "For the World Is Hollow and I Have Touched
the Sky," proved downright embarrassing.

After the
cancellation of Star Trek, Kelley returned to his pattern of avoiding
science fiction, with the conspicuous exception of a respectable performance in
the definitive film about monstrous killer rabbits, Night of the Lepus,
which is actually a bit better than published reports would suggest (in other
words, it is about as good as a movie about giant rabbits could possibly be). By
the time he was summoned back in the late 1970s to appear in a series of Star
Trek movies, however, Kelley's McCoy had lost his mojo; for the films
unequivocally established Spock as Kirk's main man, and audiences were by then
so accustomed to exotic aliens in weird makeup that there was no longer any
need for a reassuringly ordinary presence on board the starship Enterprise.
No longer serving any important purpose, McCoy now seemed like little more than
a crotchety senior citizen unhappily recalled from retirement, which was in
effect what the sixty-something Kelley actually was. He also seemed reluctant
and unhappy when asked, as a representative of the original Star Trek
cast, to bless its successor series Star Trek: The Next Generation by
making a cameo appearance in its first episode.

After declining
to play a small role in Star Trek: Generations—continuing to believe
that his character deserved only starring roles—Kelley relaxed in his last
years, limiting his acting work to providing a few voices and appearing in Star
Trek documentaries. Significantly, while his one-time colleague in
spacefaring, James DOOHAN, sought to have his ashes blasted into outer space,
DeForest Kelley was perfectly content to have his ashes scattered in his home
planet's Pacific Ocean, a fitting ending for Star Trek's most down-to-Earth
character.